Successfully fighting climate change requires the support of both parties

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 contains Congress’s largest investment to date to deal with climate change. It passed without a single Republican vote. Before this, Congress’s most significant effort was in 2009 with enactment of ARRA (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) during the first month of President Obama’s first term. No House Republican voted for the ARRA, and only three Republican senators did.

It wasn’t always this way.

When climate change first appeared on the national agenda the commitment to deal with it was bipartisan. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, President George H. W. Bush stated the U.S. position: “Let me be clear on one fundamental point. The United States fully intends to be the world’s preeminent leader in protecting the global environment. We have been that for many years. We will remain so.”

Before 2010, some Republican members of Congress provided leadership to deal with climate change. In 2003, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), took the lead in introducing the first major bill on the issue in the Senate. In 2007, three Republicans (Ted Stevens of Alaska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania), joined me and three other Democrats in introducing the Low Carbon Economy Act. It proposed to set up a cap-and-trade system, but without all the complexity included in the House-passed bill. 

But opposition to dealing with climate change became a litmus test for Republicans seeking their party’s nomination in the 2010 midterm election campaigns. In June 2009, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed in the Democratic-controlled House. To defeat the legislation, the Koch brothers, through Americans for Prosperity, worked with others from the fossil fuel industry to galvanize members of the tea party to oppose the bill. They succeeded. The bill died in the Senate in the face of a threatened Republican-led filibuster.

Since 2010, congressional Republicans have prevented enactment of significant legislation on the issue. President Trump’s strong opposition reinforced Republican opposition in Congress. 

In the 12 years since the Republican Party made climate change a political issue, the scientific evidence of climate change has become overwhelming. The real world evidence is also too obvious to ignore: record high temperatures, long-term drought in the southwest, increased frequency of forest and grassland fires, and historic flooding in coastal areas and even in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) home state.

Yet Republicans still feel no responsibility to address the issue.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) deserve great credit for developing the Inflation Reduction Act, and securing its passage. Now, in 2022, Democrats have finally managed to make progress, but they have had to do so without the help of a single Republican in either house of Congress.

Much more needs to be done. In Congress Democrats should not be the only ones committed to protecting the global environment. Until Republicans also are willing to support constructive policies to address climate change, our efforts to reduce emissions to stabilize the climate will continue to fall short.       

Jeff Bingaman served as a United States Senator from New Mexico from 1983 to 2013, for 5 terms, and is a former chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. His book, “BREAKDOWN, Lessons for a Congress in Crisis,” will be published in October by High Road Books.